In the decades since, the agronomist and history buff traveled the state, stopping at houses where he saw apple trees growing and asking permission to cut a twig, which he would later graft onto rootstock at his home orchard. He cataloged his research varieties in three-ringed binders, which he stored in the guest bedroom of his house.

Cidermaker Diane Flynt, founder of Foggy Ridge Cider in Virginia, still recalls the moment Calhoun—who has been referred to as the “savior” of Southern apples—showed her those binders. It was 2017, and Calhoun had just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which would take his life this February, at the age of 85.

Flynt remembers Lee telling her, “I got there at the last minute; these people were [old], and they remembered their grandparents, who were alive in the 1800s, and who really knew what those apples were.”

With Calhoun’s future uncertain at the time, Flynt wanted to be sure that his research lived on, and so she called colleagues at the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina. A team started recording conversations with Calhoun and cataloging his research to ensure that his legacy would be preserved.

Collecting Southern Apples—and Their Stories

Most traditional apple varieties disappeared from the landscape when growers started planting varieties that were better suited to industrial production. In the 1980s, when Calhoun started researching and cataloging rare varieties, he was tireless in his efforts.

Calhoun would place ads in rural electric co-op newsletters asking for stories about apple trees—and receive hundreds of letters in response.

Knocking on the doors of people’s home, he would ask, “What kind of apple tree is growing in your backyard?” He would place ads in rural co-op newsletters asking for stories about apple trees—and receive hundreds of letters in response.

“The letters are amazing,” says Flynt. “Some are from botanists, and some are from folks who are hardly literate. They all wanted to tell Lee the stories of their apple trees. Some sent pictures or hand-drawn maps to [the locations of] the trees.”

Calhoun eventually traveled from North Carolina to the National Agricultural Library in Maryland to trace the history of the fruit’s varieties.

His collection of research became the basis for his seminal work, Old Southern Apples, first published in 1995. Featuring 1,800 apple varieties that originated in the South or were grown there before 1928, his publisher, Chelsea Green, called the work “an indispensable reference for fruit lovers.” The depth of his research—and his passion for the topic—helped Calhoun earn a reputation as one of the foremost figures in American apple conservation.

“His book produced a shockwave,” says Dr. Elizabeth Engelhardt, John Shelton Reed distinguished professor of Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. At first, people expected Calhoun to find around ten kinds of Southern apples. “He found hundreds, and he found those because in the South, we like to tell stories,” Engelhardt says. “Once you talk about apples, you start to see them… in backyards, along roadways—and Lee cared about the varietals that had these important stories.”

In addition to writing about Southern apples, Calhoun used his knowledge of grafting (which he learned from an article in Sunset magazine) to grow iconic varieties like Nickajack and Magnum Bonum, along with lesser-known ones like Buff and Cullasaga, and to sell them through his nursery.

Lee Calhoun at Horne Creek Farm in 2019. (Photo courtesy of Diane Flynt)

Calhoun operated the nursery, which opened in 1986 with 60 apple trees, with his late wife, Edith. By the time he retired in 2002, he was growing more than 400 varieties. Horne Creek Living Historical Farm in Pinnacle, North Carolina maintains the nursery collection.

Helping Others to Grow

Calhoun was generous with his time, writing letters and spending hours on the phone with apple enthusiasts who had questions, needed help, or wanted to share stories.

Flynt first came across Calhoun’s book in 1997 while researching cider apple varieties for the orchard she was planting in Dugspur, Virginia, to start Foggy Ridge Cider. In addition to offering advice, Calhoun traveled from North Carolina to Virginia to tour the site and help Flynt choose the best cider varieties for her location; it turned into an enduring friendship.

While Flynt has worked to help ensure that Calhoun’s legacy lives on, others, too, are helping make sure his work endures. In 1999, when Calhoun was just getting out of the nursery business, David Vernon, owner of Century Farm Orchards in Reidsville, North Carolina, was just getting started. Vernon had moved back to his family farm and discovered apple trees that his grandfather planted in the 1800s.

“Someone said that the only way to save them was to graft them, and I had no idea how to do that,” Vernon recalls. “I came across an ad in an electrical co-op magazine… and I called him.”

“Lee preserved hundreds of apple trees that would have gone into extinction had he not made them available for other people to grow.”

The phone call led to another long friendship. Calhoun taught Vernon how to graft and, over a period of years, their connection resulted in the passing of the torch. Vernon’s nursery now grows and sells more than 500 varieties of apples, including several from Calhoun’s collection.

“Lee preserved hundreds of apple trees that would have gone into extinction had he not made them available for other people to grow,” Vernon says.

Vernon has found a lot of interest in heritage apples in recent years. While some growers want trees that are well-suited to growing in Southern climates, others are simply looking for non-GMO varieties (there is only one genetically engineered variety on the market, however). Flavor, however, is one of the biggest reasons for the resurgence. “Most of the uses of the apples in the grocery store are for snacks, they’re not for cooking; they’re not for making cider,” Vernon explains.

A Living Legacy

Calhoun donated the papers he kept from the 1970s until 2010 to the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and last year, Engelhardt assembled a team of archivists from the Southern Historical Collection at Wilson Library to record his oral history. Thanks to those efforts, all of his work—an estimated 1,200 items—have been archived in the library and made available online.

“Lee was, fundamentally, a scientist who was fascinated by the diversity of apples and their complications; he was also fascinated by the stories of apples,” says Engelhardt.

From left: Keia Mastrianni, Lee Calhoun, Diane Flynt, Chef Andrea Resuing. Photo courtesy of Diane Flynt.

Students in the undergraduate Southern Studies program use Calhoun’s papers as the basis of their final projects. Their work ranged from the evolution of apples in advertising to exploring apple smoke flavor to mapping fruit trees around Chapel Hill.

In the Spring of 2019, about a year before he died, Calhoun was the guest of honor at a reception where students presented their work. The attendees included friends, students, apple enthusiasts, and cider makers.

“I think it can feel like if you donate papers to a library, they might just sit there,” Engelhardt says. “But these are not just going to sit there; people are going to use them.” At the reception, Engelhardt continued, “Lee told me that he was especially moved that the students were already using the materials.”

Most importantly, Calhoun’s legacy lives on in the orchards throughout the South, where some of the 400 varieties that he managed to preserve (and the 1,800 Southern apples he cataloged) throughout his lifetime are growing today—apples that would have otherwise disappeared from the landscape.

Top photo by Donn Young, UNC College of Arts & Sciences

The post An Appreciation for Lee Calhoun, the Man who Saved Southern Apples appeared first on Civil Eats.

Now, the dining room is closed, and instead of serving nose-to-tail suppers, chef/owner Heard is filling bags with groceries. In the last two weeks, she has stocked (and sold out of) staples such as eggs, salt, and lemons; customers purchased 100 pounds of flour in a single afternoon. The coronavirus pandemic has led Foreign & Domestic to evolve from a full-service restaurant into a grocery store.

“We knew that people were having trouble finding things at the stores,” Heard recalls. “We thought it could help the neighborhood—and it’s possibly the only reason we’re staying afloat.”

The pandemic dealt a significant blow to restaurants. The latest data from the U.S. Department of Labor shows that the U.S. lost a total of 701,000 jobs in March; restaurants and bars accounted for 60 percent of those losses. The devastation had forced restaurants to get creative to keep their doors open. In addition to offering takeout and deliveries, steakhouses are being reinvented as butcher shops, upscale eateries are hosting virtual cocktail classes, and chefs are creating DIY meal kits. Turning dining rooms into supermarkets is also proving popular.

The trend has touched small restaurants, restaurant groups with multiple outlets, and national chains. In recent days, both Panera and Subway have launched their own grocery stores.

Restaurants depend on different supply chains than grocery stores, providing chefs with access to staples that are sold out in supermarkets. Large restaurant suppliers such as Sysco and U.S. Foods have stockpiles of ingredients that restaurants are no longer ordering for their kitchens. The staples are in restaurant-sized quantities—think 50-pound bags of flour and flats of eggs—that can be shipped out from their warehouses.

The restaurant-turning-grocery-store trend is helping restaurant suppliers keep revenue flowing at a time when chefs aren’t ordering ingredients for their kitchens, and it is providing consumers with staples at a time when they’re scrambling to fill their shopping carts at conventional supermarkets. Sysco even rolled out a portal to help its restaurant customers embrace the “corner-store concept” that includes advice for setting up regular markets or one-time pop-up events.

“It’s a way for chefs to continue supporting the local food system and helps them from going bankrupt.”

“It provides a huge opportunity for restaurants to stay open,” says Katherine Miller, vice president of impact for the James Beard Foundation. “It’s a way for chefs to continue supporting the local food system and… [it] gives them much-needed revenue to help them from going bankrupt.”

‘Like An Emergency Transfusion’

In Washington, D.C., Farmers Restaurant Group (FRG) owner Dan Simons knew takeout and deliveries would not sustain his restaurants. Simons cut the staff of 1,100 down to 80, reduced the salaries of those who remained on the payroll, and launched Founding Farmers Market & Grocery in the hopes pivoting into the retail grocery business would help keep the doors open.

“We needed value pricing and frequent shopping,” Simons explains. “We needed a new business model, and I’d much rather be delivering people $100 or $150 of prepared foods and groceries and staples than try to sell them prime rib, mashed potatoes, and green beans [like they might off the menu at a restaurant] right now.”

The team at FRG developed a complete e-commerce platform to allow customers to order 800-plus supermarket staples alongside prepared foods and cocktails, schedule pick-up times, and have groceries loaded into their vehicles curbside from its locations in Potomac, Maryland, and Tysons, Virginia.

When the website launched on April 5, it logged $50,000 in orders in the first 48 hours. Simons likened the impact of the revenue to an emergency transfusion for an accident victim.

Although restaurants aren’t licensed to operate as supermarkets, few bureaucrats have raised red flags over the pivot. In fact, Texas governor Greg Abbott made an official announcement allowing restaurants to sell retail products from distributors provided the items were in their original packaging.

Public health officials in Los Angeles County initially responded to the trend by shutting down several restaurants for operating without grocery permits, but the county later reversed their stance, allowing the items to be sold by takeout and delivery. Los Angeles-based designer Kelsey Stefanson has since created a spreadsheet and mobile-friendly website listing the 150+ restaurants selling groceries in the city.

The flexibility to create a new model has helped Showmars, a fast casual Greek American restaurant with 30 locations in North and South Carolina, keep the doors open after the lack of lunchtime business forced several high-volume locations to shut down.

General Manager Zack Zitsos wanted to minimize layoffs and maximize cash flow; a grocery model felt like the right move.

When the chain rolled out its Grocery Essentials concept on March 29, sales were 300 percent over the initial projections; several items sold out within the first few hours. The online store now stocks Costco-size quantities of grocery items—everything from whole milk to chicken breasts to frozen peas to toilet paper—distributed by contact-less deliveries. The demand is almost unmanageable; Zitsos limited orders to 100 per day to ensure he could meet the need.

Showmars’ Grocery Essentials best sellers.

The Learning Curve—and the Days to Come

Adjusting to a new model, Zitsos admits, is not without its challenges. “We know how to do the restaurant business right, but this is a whole new process,” he says. “There is a learning curve to getting it right.”

In the restaurant business, he explains, service is limited to the number of seats in the dining room, and timing is more predictable; operators know that the weekend dinner rush will be far more hectic than mid-afternoon on a Wednesday. Grocery orders are harder to predict, Heard says.

Additionally, because food service companies don’t package items for retail sale, some restaurants are selling bulk quantities such as 10-pound packages of ground beef and five-pound boxes of pasta, while others are repackaging staples into smaller quantities for resale—hello single rolls of toilet paper and Ziploc baggies filled with flour (their decision about whether to repackage is often based on local ordinances). On top of that, prep cooks and waitstaff are not to trained in order fulfillment, and establishments must complete all tasks with strict adherence to strict safety protocols to minimize the spread of COVID-19.

Simons is attempting to juggle overwhelming demand with access to protective equipment that will keep his staff safe while filling orders. Given the current state of the restaurant industry—and the economy in general—he is grateful to have the dilemma.

“Without this pivot, I’d be looking at an unsolvable problem” of how to stay in business and pay employees, he says. “We needed this model to keep us in the fight.”

A shuttered restaurant in Claremont Village, California. (Photo CC-licensed by Russ Allison Loar)

Like all restaurant owners, Simons hopes the dining room at Farmers Restaurant Group will be open and serving meals before long, but he anticipates maintaining the grocery model for the foreseeable future. “We might convert part of the dining room into an artisan market and allow shoppers to come inside once restrictions are loosened,” he says. “If there’s another outbreak, we don’t want it to crush us; this [pivot] positions us for what’s ahead.”

Miller of the James Beard Foundation agrees that markets could be the new norm for restaurants. “In restaurants, like in farming, margins are small,” she adds. “I think a lot of chefs and restaurants will stick with these new things to help diversify their revenues when things open back up.”

In Austin, Heard continues adding new items to her online supermarket, but she has no intention of continuing to sell groceries post-pandemic. “It’s not as rewarding,” she says. “I’m super thankful we’re doing it and it’ll bring in enough [revenue] to let us break even, but I miss making food and talking to guests; I’d like to go back to the restaurant business.”

The post Restaurants Are Transforming into Grocery Stores to Survive the Pandemic appeared first on Civil Eats.

“In the regular wildcrafting market, black cohosh is a low-value product,” Pridgen explains. “I agreed to be a test case [for the Appalachian Beginning Forest Farmer Coalition (ABFFC)] to see if getting [United Plant Savers’] Forest Grown Verification (FGV) certification—and working with an herb buyer who valued knowing the source of the product and was willing to reward growers for taking extra steps to ensure sustainability of forest botanicals—would create a market.”

The Forest Grown Verification was created in 2014 to distinguish farmed products from foraged plants and establish parameters to sustainably cultivate woodland botanicals. It requires growers to follow strict practices for ethical, sustainable land and species management to protect wild woodland botanicals from overharvesting.

Black cohosh is a shade-grown, native flowering plant that is prized for the medicinal properties of its roots, which are used to treat coughs, fever, menstrual cramps, and the symptoms of menopause. But concerns about overharvesting it and other wild botanicals, including ginseng, goldenseal, and ramps, have led to new efforts to preserve wild populations. Forest farming, the intentional cultivation of crops in wooded areas, is one potential solution, because it provides an alternative wild populations, and therefor gives them a chance to rebound.

“It’s about optimizing the relationships between crops, trees, and/or livestock to maximize product output and enhance environmental conservation,” explains John Munsell, associate professor of forest resources and environmental conservation at Virginia Tech university and project director for ABFFC.

The 2015 experiment on Pridgen’s property worked. She earned $25 for every pound of wild black cohosh she sold—or 25 times more than the going rate for foraged, non-certified black cohosh. (The current market rate for FGV black cohosh is $40 per pound.)

Washed black cohosh root. (Photo by Priya Jaishanker.)

And instead of spending hours at farmers’ markets selling small quantities of the forest botanicals to multiple customers, Pridgen was able to sell the entire 25-pound harvest in a single transaction to Mountain Rose Herbs, an Oregon-based retailer of organic, sustainable, wild harvested products.

Intentional Cultivation to Protect Biodiversity

Appalachia, one of the most biodiverse regions in the world, is home to 50 medicinal plant species that are in consistent demand thanks to a booming herbal products industry that generated $8.84 billion in retail sales in 2018.

But that growing demand has a dark side. Foragers collected more than 9,000 pounds of wild ginseng in West Virginia in 2018, leading to significant population decline. Some data shows that just 6 percent of ginseng harvests were legal, and foragers often use unsustainable harvesting practices, including removing adult plants before seeds have ripened, which further decimates wild populations.

Overharvesting has also devastated wild populations of goldenseal, ramps, and black cohosh.

Appalachian Beginning Forest Farmer Training. (Photo by Priya Jaishanker)

Although scant data about population levels exists, the Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES) lists ginseng and goldenseal as vulnerable species, placing strict regulations on harvesting, including limited collection periods and required permitting to harvest on state and federal lands. United Plant Savers (UPS), an Ohio-based nonprofit dedicated to medicinal plant conservation, has added multiple woodland botanicals that are native to Appalachia to its species at risk list, including black cohosh. In Quebec, overharvesting has led to strict limits on picking ramps.

Appalachian Beginning Forest Farmer Coalition was established in 2015 to formalize forest farming efforts for woodland botanicals. The coalition, which connects farmers, universities, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations, received grant funding to provide technical training to beginning forest farmers, teaching them to grow and harvest woodland botanicals while being good stewards of the land.

The nonprofit advocates three different kinds of farming: Wild-stewarded, or the intentional propagation and tending of existing wild population for sustained output (the approach Pridgen uses); wild-simulated farming, which uses seeds or root stocks to start new populations to encourage new growth; and woods-grown (also called woods-cultivated) farming, which mimics more traditional farming.

Regardless of the method, Munsell notes, the goal is to ensure a sustainable supply chain that poses no threat to wild populations.

“Forest farming is a model that allows industry to trace the line of production back to a farmer, back to a community, back to a section of woodland, and understand the nature of production,” he explains. “With wild harvesting, buyers along the supply chain aren’t certain when raw materials will show up.”

Providing Opportunities to a Struggling Region

Munsell estimates at least half of the 50-plus economically distressed communities in the region are in hotspots for forest botanical production and for many low-income folks living in Appalachia, foraging and wildcrafting are some of the only economic options. In a 2019 study, researchers at the University of Georgia found that overharvesting of ginseng was more prevalent in areas with high poverty rates.

Bright red berries on a ginseng plant around mid-August signify maturity. (Photo by Priya Jaishanker for Appalachian Forest Farmers)

Promoting forest farming as an alternative to foraging may provide additional opportunities in the region. “[Foraging] is a deep, embedded part of the culture, and forest farming provides a little more permanence,” Munsell adds. “There are farmers in the mountains that have open space for growing vegetables but also want to extend operations into the woodlands. We’re working to get the prices for the product up so … local communities can take advantage of the opportunities, and we can ensure sustainability.”

Not all low-income, underserved communities have access to land, however, so ABFFC is working to develop common models and low-cost land leasing programs. Additionally, the coalition, which counts an estimated 700 beginning forest farmers among its members, hosts programming to provide education and technical support to help forest farmers grow woodland botanicals.

Developing a Market

So far, just 15 farms—located in West Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New York, and Maryland—have earned verification for three crops: ginseng, black cohosh, and goldenseal.

Susan Leopold, executive director at UPS, hopes to expand FGV to 30 farms and add certified bloodroot and ramps over the next three years. In the meantime, certified woodland botanicals are in high demand, and buyers are willing to pay premium prices.

ABFFC training session. (Photo by Priya Jaishanker for Appalachian Forest Farmers)

“There is way more demand than supply,” Leopold says. “A lot of people are interested in growing forest botanicals [and] consumers are excited to have access to amazing medicinal herbs without contributing to the endangerment of the species.”

A commitment to sustainable sourcing led several small herb companies, including Mountain Rose Herbs, to seek out FGV products like ginseng.

The Future of Forest Farming

Munsell hopes that ABFFC will continue expanding its resources and educational programming to help beginning forest farmers get started and to support the expansion of the forest farming movement. UPS continues promoting FGV and Fair Wild, a UK-based certification that applies similar standards to wildcrafted herbs and also covers international forest botanicals.

Despite these efforts, woodland botanicals might not provide the same regular income as more conventional crops.

In Independence, Michelle Pridgen last harvested black cohosh in 2015; using the wild-stewarded approach, which increases the time between harvests, she is waiting for her woodland stand of the herb to be plentiful enough for a second harvest.

The FGV certifier, who monitors the crop to ensure compliance with program requirements, suggested she continue letting the population recover before harvesting again. Pridgen estimates the black cohosh will be ready later this year.

Although populations of the perennial, slow-growing species can take several years to mature, a growing number of forest farmers—and consumers—are willing to wait.

“I think this is going to, hopefully, get people into the mindset that this is a really specialized product,” Pridgen says. “And if we value the wild populations and the genetic diversity that we’re so fortunate to have in the Appalachians, we’ll be willing to pay more for the assurance of sustainability.”

Photos CC-licensed by Appalachian Forest Farmers.

This article was updated to correct the fact that Mountain Rose Herbs is based in Oregon, not California.

The post In Appalachia, Forest Farming is Protecting Wild Botanical Plants appeared first on Civil Eats.

The City of Atlanta wants to change that; in 2016, it purchased a 7.1-acre former farm in the underserved neighborhood and turned the land into the nation’s largest food forest. Dozens of walnut, pecan, mulberry, and serviceberry trees were already established on the site, and the project plan calls for the addition of raised beds planted with berries, herbs, root vegetables, and more to transform the edible landscape into a powerful community resource.

A wide view of the Atlanta Food Forest at Browns Mill. (Photo courtesy of AgLanta)

The Urban Food Forest at Browns Mill is the latest example of cities incorporating food forests—or managed edible orchards and gardens open to the public to harvest free of charge—into their landscapes. Although there’s no solid national data on the number of food forests in the U.S., they’ve been popping up in cities ranging from Seattle and San Francisco to Portland, Maine, and Raleigh, North Carolina in recent years. While food forests help preserve green space, provide homes for wildlife, enhance biodiversity, and encourage community gatherings, fighting hunger is the reason most cited by their founders.

“Any time there is another strategy for collaboratively growing food and using underutilized spaces to do it, people get excited,” says Sari Albornoz, the Grow Local program director for the Sustainable Food Center, an Austin, Texas-based nonprofit organization working to improve access to nutritious, affordable food. “Food forests are one more idea people are embracing [in addition to programs like SNAP and WIC, encouraging farmers’ markets in food deserts, and increasing minimum wage], because it has the potential to address food insecurity.”

But while the idea of a food forest may sound good, it’s still unclear whether they are effective—and what little research exists on the model suggests that they face a number of challenges. Research shows that harvests might be fairly small, for example, and that people might not take advantage of the food even when it is available.

Community Garden Manager Douglas Hardeman (right) welcomes visitors to the food forest. (Photo courtesy of AgLanta)

In Atlanta, the Urban Food Forest at Browns Mill is part of an ambitious goal to bring 85 percent of the city’s residents within a half-mile of fresh food before 2022. The city launched the project with the support of $164,000 in grant funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service Community Forest and Open Space Conservation programs and local nonprofits, including Trees Atlanta and The Georgia Conservation Fund. The Atlanta Department of Parks and Recreation will manage the property, and volunteers will help maintain it.

Organizers encourage neighbors to see the food forest as their own outdoor produce aisle and Mario Cambardella, the urban agriculture director for the City of Atlanta, also hopes to start a farmers’ market to help boost the odds that people will take the produce home.

And yet, Cambardella is unsure about whether the food forest will ultimately reduce food insecurity among residents. “The food forest is one piece of the overall strategy of bringing fresh fruits and vegetables to residents,” he says, “but I am not saying we’re going to solve hunger or food insecurity.” The group also hopes to use vacant properties around the city and give low-income communities the opportunity to “take license of property to grow food,” he adds.

Feeding a Need

With the right management, food forests can produce significant quantities of food. In one study, researchers found that a 222-acre plot filled with apple trees could yield enough fruit to meet 108 percent of the daily recommended minimum intake of fruit for the entire population of Burlington, Vermont, for instance. The findings led researchers to conclude that food forests offer “substantial untapped potential” to improve food security.

Albornoz of the Sustainable Food Center appreciates that food forests often do more than just provide food, however. Organizations hire workers to maintain the fruitful landscapes or host markets to sell produce at a profit. The living-wage jobs allow workers to buy fresh, nutrient-dense foods at the supermarket, and revenue from market sales can be used to support nonprofits that are focused on improving food access. Food forests also provide a sense of community as well as a vehicle to start conversations about food insecurity.

Touring the garden beds at the Food Forest at Browns Mill. (Photo courtesy of AgLanta)

“There are an array of benefits that come from giving people opportunities to grow their own food or harvest and eat fresh food other than just the food and the nourishment itself,” Albornoz says. “Food forests are about building community, social cohesion, and social capital and beautifying neighborhoods. Though that can sometimes make people say that they only make a marginal difference in improving food security, I think it can serve both needs.”

A Model with Limitations

Still, depending on food forests to provide adequate quantities of fresh produce to feed food-insecure residents is a risk. At the Beacon Food Forest in Seattle, one of the most well-established food forests in the nation, neighbors harvested 4,250 pounds of produce from the 1.75-acre site in 2017. But issues like weather and pests make yields unpredictable, and the 2018 harvest dropped 40 percent, to 2,821 pounds of produce. For residents who counted on fruits, vegetables, nuts, and herbs from the plot to supplement their diets, the shrinking harvest presented a major challenge.

Volunteers at a work party at the Beacon Food Forest in July 2019. (Photo © Jonathan H. Lee – subtledream.com)

A 2018 study published in the journal Sustainability noted that legalizing food production in urban areas is not enough to promote food equity and food justice, and expanding urban agriculture doesn’t guarantee that food insecure residents will access the food. A lack of knowledge that food forests exist—or a lack of understanding about their purpose—as well as struggles with transportation to the sites and too little time to harvest the food could deter some people from taking advantage of the resource.

In Atlanta, Cambardella worries that the overwhelming amount of press the food forest has received will turn it into a local attraction that may not serve people in need. He also worries that the attention will draw people who may abuse the access. “The other day we walked on the site and someone had harvested half the mint—and it was a big stand—which left us [thinking], ‘One person does not need that much mint.’”

Outside of food forests, research published in the Journal of Urban Ecology in 2019 found that even foragers who had access to an abundance of wild edibles could not access sufficient quantities to meet their nutritional needs. The study found that lower-income neighborhoods have fewer edible trees and less foraging potential than higher-income neighborhoods; most foragers have to travel far from home to access free edible foods.

Birdwatching at the Atlanta Food Forest. (Photo courtesy of AgLanta)

“Does foraging address food sovereignty? The right of people to find their own culturally appropriate food system? Absolutely,” says Avalon Bunge, lead researcher of the Journal of Urban Ecology study. “But food insecurity? That’s a problem.”

A participatory research project in California’s East Bay, where almost one-third of the population is food insecure, is examining the agronomic problems facing urban agriculture projects in the area (including pests, soil contaminants, and more) in hopes of finding ways to improve growing practices, increase yields, and contribute to food security.

Organizers of the Festival Beach Food Forest in Austin, Texas, are also grappling with how to provide enough produce to make a dent in the local need. In a county where 16 percent of residents lack access to affordable, nutritious food, Austin Parks and Recreation Department set aside just two-thirds of an acre to create a food forest. The first plants went into the ground in 2015. Neighbors harvest produce, and volunteers pick what’s left  donates it to local food pantries.

No data is being collected on the amount of produce harvested or what percentage of the yield gets into the hands of those in need (though the project does donate a portion of its harvest to the local food bank), but co-founder Jodi Lane often sees people harvesting food, which gives her hope that the effort is having an impact.

It’s too soon to know how the urban food forest in Atlanta will benefit residents of the Lakewood-Browns Mill neighborhood, but Cambardella is hopeful that it will have an impact on underserved residents.

“We’re building a local food economy, and we’re working toward abundance,” he says. “These communities have been resilient in this neighborhood for a long time, and this will just be another part of the infrastructure to battle food insecurity.”

Top photo: A wide view of the Atlanta Food Forest at Browns Mill. (Photo courtesy of AgLanta)

The post Can Food Forests Fight Hunger? appeared first on Civil Eats.

The study, from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future and the U.S. Forest Service, surveyed 105 self-identified foragers in Baltimore to understand the motivations of people who seek out parks, forests, residential neighborhoods, and corporate campuses for wild edibles including berries, mushrooms, rose hips, and dandelions.

“If foraging is comprising a large fraction of your diet, there may be economic motivations for that,” said Dr. Keeve Nachman, one of the researchers of the study and the director of the food production and public health program at Johns Hopkins. More than half of the foragers cited economic benefits as their main motivation. And foraged foods made up three times more of the diets of Baltimore residents earning less than $40,000 per year than those earning more than $100,000. Moreover, for 10 percent of foragers, wild edibles accounted for 20 percent or more of their diets.

Not only are wild edibles widely available and free for the taking—most are nutrient-dense as well. For example, lambsquarters are an excellent source of vitamins B6 and K, folate, and riboflavin; rose hips are rich in vitamin C; and hazelnuts contain protein, fat, and fiber. But factors including cultural norms, potential environmental contamination, and local laws often inhibit the practice’s ability to proliferate.

“There are a lot of high-end restaurants and hipsters embracing [edible] weeds, but there are still social and cultural barriers to foraging,” said Philip Stark, associate dean of mathematics and physical sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, and founder of Berkeley Open Source Food.

Stark noted that foraging fell out of favor with the rise of industrial agriculture, triggering a belief that food sold in a package or stocked in a supermarket is safe, but food plucked from the soil is icky.

“The more we normalize weeds as foods, the more we can change people’s attitudes about foraging,” he said, “but I don’t think we’ll ever get a substantial percentage of the population to forage.”

Eric Kelly, one of the foragers included in the Johns Hopkins’ study, agrees. Even those interested in foraging often give up upon realizing the amount of education and effort it takes to find and harvest wild edibles. “You have to spend a lot of time learning to identify plants and process them so they don’t taste like bubbling garbage,” he said.

Overcoming the “ick” factor is just one roadblock. Nachman also worries about potential chemical exposures from consuming foraged foods, especially those harvested in risky areas.

The Urban Forestry and Urban Greening study found that 15 percent of foraging sites were commercial, including industrial and agricultural lands where contaminants are more prevalent. In the next phase of his research, Nachman plans to gather samples from foraging sites across Baltimore and test them for toxic residues.

Additionally, harvesting food from public or private lands is often illegal. In 2013, a Chicago Tribune article noted that a 75-year-old man, “barely making it on Social Security,” was fined $75 for picking dandelions to make a salad. The Daily Mail reported that a nurse foraging for mushrooms in the U.K. was ordered to pay £364 in fines and court costs in 2016.

For those lacking funds to fill their refrigerators, the possibility of being fined for foraging could be too large of a risk. But Marla R. Emery, research geographer at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service and co-author of the Baltimore foraging research, notes that policies prohibiting foraging could be ripe for change.

“We’ve heard concerns about the ecological impacts of foraging and concerns about potential exposure to contaminates,” Emery said. “But park managers are increasingly interested in managing parks as multi-functional landscapes that provide a variety of benefits to the citizens.” Emery added that sharing with park managers the findings that the five most frequently foraged edibles are both weedy species and quite nutrient-dense could help managers decide “whether or not there might be scope for allowing at least some foraging in the lands that they manage.”

Although the Johns Hopkins study doesn’t address the larger issues that drive food insecurity—such as poverty and a lack of affordable housing—the authors do note that their results point the way toward creating urban planning, policy, and design guidelines that can encourage, or at least not criminalize, gathering wild foods.

And cities around the country are starting to take action. Seattle recently changed its rules about foraging and, in its 2013 Urban Forest Stewardship Plan, stated that fruit and nut trees and other wild foods provided a valuable food source for residents and that foraging maintains traditions and deepens connections to nature, making it a legitimate use of urban forests.  Free-food parks have also been popping up nationwide in recent years.

Even as public attitudes and policies are slowly changing, the trend of foraging is raising its profile for profit-making.

“There are already people commoditizing on our romantic notions of wild foods on our plates,” Baltimore forager Eric Kelly said. “You can buy dandelion greens at Whole Foods.”

The post Foraging is Alive and Well in Baltimore. Can it Help Fight Hunger Too? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Until spring, almost all of the fresh fruits and vegetables distributed through the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma are imported from warmer climes like Mexico and California. Those donations are few and far between, often leaving the food bank distributing non-perishable items such as canned tomatoes, peanut butter, and pasta instead of fresh foods. To address this gap, the food bank started to grow its own greens, ensuring a stable supply of fresh, locally-grown produce for its clients.

“Our priority is getting healthy foods to the people that need them, but getting donated produce has been a big challenge for us—and having fresh produce is even tougher in the winter months,” said John McCarthy, the food bank’s director of community incentives.

Inside the Community Food Bank of Oklahoma’s vertical farm. (Photo courtesy Growtainers)

In 2016, the food bank installed a vertical farm—an indoor, temperature-controlled environment where food is grown in stacked towers under LED lights. The two 40-foot by 8-foot shipping containers that make up the operation were upfitted into indoor hydroponic farms by Growtainers, one of several manufacturers of vertical farm systems. The containers are designed to produce up to 1,800 heads of lettuce and other leafy greens every 45 days—regardless of the time of year.

“We harvest greens in the morning, and they’re available in the afternoon, producing a really nice product we can count on,” McCarthy said.

Farming is generally not commonplace among food banks. Feeding America, a nonprofit, nationwide network of food banks, reports that only 29 of its 200 members operate farms and distribute that produce to food insecure and low-income clients. And this is mostly because land is expensive to acquire or lease; growing food is time- and labor-intensive and requires specialized knowledge; and many food banks choose instead to focus their efforts on the logistics of getting food to people in need.

But vertical farms—with manufacturers’ promises of producing large amounts of food in a small footprint through high-tech, plug-and-play growing operations—could bring about a shift in food banks’ willingness to grow their own food. Unlike greenhouses, which can lack light and temperature control, thereby limiting the growing season, vertical farms might offer food banks the ability to grow food year-round.

With the National Organic Standards Board recently making the controversial recommendation that hydroponic and aeroponic systems be eligible to earn organic certification, vertical farms are poised to reach new levels of popularity. And though there is no data on the number of food banks operating vertical farms, several appear to be experimenting with the high-tech approach.

Cultivating the Right Approach for the Climate

One of the biggest arguments against food banks getting into the vertical-farming business is simply that these systems are pricey. The Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma paid $140,000 for its two Growtainers, securing a grant from the Morningcrest Healthcare Foundation to purchase the vertical farms. It costs an additional $680 per month for electricity to power them.

For nonprofits, cost can be a barrier and, in some locations, indoor farms are an unnecessary expense. The learning curve can also be steep and most food banks rely on volunteer labor to handle maintenance and harvesting, often with training from the manufacturers of the vertical systems.

The climate was the main reason the Surrey Food Bank, the second-largest food bank in British Columbia, installed a vertical farm from Living Garden Foods at one of its four locations earlier this year. The wall-mounted towers grow produce in eight rows; fresh lettuce and kale are harvested every six weeks, allowing the food bank to provide fresh greens for up to 80 families at its Cloverdale location.

“A lot of food banks have outdoor community gardens, but this is a new thing, and we think it’s working well,” said Feezah Jaffer, the food bank’s executive director.

The Surrey Food Bank’s vertical farm system. (Photo © Pixel Perfect Photography)

Still, some food banks growing food in warmer climates are continuing to grow outside. San Antonio Food Bank, for example. operates a 75-acre farm and an urban orchard with 170 fruit trees, distributing produce to clients in 16 counties across Texas. The conventional farming plots grow everything from onions and potatoes to watermelons and cantaloupe, helping the food bank achieve its mission to provide fresh, healthy foods to those in need.

Because of the success of the farms, Patrick Brennan, manager of facilities and agricultural initiatives at the San Antonio Food Bank, has no immediate plans to add vertical farming to the agricultural operations.

“In more extreme climates, growing indoors is a more attractive option,” Brennan explained. “We do get temperature fluctuations and occasional freezes, so vertical farming might be in our future, but for now we have the ability in Central Texas to decrease costs by growing produce traditionally.”

Working Through the Growing Pains

For food banks where the climate isn’t as friendly to outdoor farming, vertical farms may hold promise. Given their positive experience with vertical farming, Surrey Food Bank in B.C. is hoping to install similar systems at the bank’s three other sites as well. While farmers donate apples, pears, cherries, and other locally grown fruits and vegetables to the food bank, those donations often fall short of demand, requiring the food bank to allocate part of its budget to purchase fresh produce. All together, produce comprises 45 percent of the food the bank distributes.

Before expanding the farming effort, however, Jaffer wants to address some of the challenges facing the current operation.

First harvest in the Community Food Bank of Oklahoma’s Growtainers. (Photo courtesy Growtainers)

Less than six months into production, volunteers at the Surrey Food Bank are still figuring out how to maximize the farm’s output. Some of the greens failed to grow, and others went to seed too fast. Additionally, varieties like Swiss chard grew well, but clients were unfamiliar with the greens or disliked their flavor. As volunteers gained experience with the vertical towers, production problems became less common and surveying families about what kinds of greens they prefer helped the food bank tweak its crop mix so no greens went uneaten.

The Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma also adjusted its approach based on feedback from clients and experience with the vertical growing system. In addition to experimenting with growing tomatoes in one of its Growtainers, the food bank reduced output of non-nutrient-dense greens such as butter lettuce, romaine, and mesclun in favor of growing more kale and spinach—and teaching clients on how to prepare it by offering recipes—to maximize the nutritional value, and reduce waste.

Jaffer at the Surrey Food Bank believes asking clients about their preferences helps provide a sense of ownership in the harvest and increases their willingness to add fresh greens to their food baskets.

“There have been growing pains, but the more we learn these lessons, the bigger of a success it becomes,” she said. “We think food banks need to evolve to meet the needs of our clients, and embracing vertical farming technology is one way we can do that.”

Top photo: The Community Food Bank of Oklahoma’s Growtainers. Photo courtesy of Growtainers.

The post With Vertical Farms, Food Banks are Growing their Own Produce to Fight Hunger appeared first on Civil Eats.

Fresh Truck is more than just a mobile supermarket, however; the nonprofit is working to get nutritious foods into the hands of people who lack access. Unlike traditional supermarkets, the shelves of the old bus are stocked with fresh fruits and vegetables and devoid of salt- and sugar-laden processed foods; shoppers can use cash, debit/credit, and EBT state welfare benefit payment cards.

Executive director Josh Trautwein came up with the idea for a mobile fresh food market while coordinating nutrition education for a Boston health center. “At the time, the only grocery store in the neighborhood closed down, so there was a big gap in our programming,” he recalled. “We were encouraging families to eat healthier, but there was nowhere close by for them to shop.”

Fresh Truck launched in 2013 with a mission to improve the health of Boston residents. The nonprofit’s two school bus-based markets make 11 stops throughout the city each week, mostly in low-income neighborhoods and food deserts where residents lack access to fresh foods and often resort to purchasing their groceries from corner stores with limited selection.

Betty Akpan says her diet has improved since she started receiving weekly $10 vouchers from South End Community Health Center in 2016. “I’m a senior citizen on a fixed income and the vouchers help a lot,” she said.

Thanks to the vouchers, Akpan can often purchase enough fruits and vegetables for several meals. Fresh Truck has a better selection than local food pantries (where Akpan can usually only get potatoes and onions) and the prices are lower than the local supermarket. “I use the vouchers and even spend a little of my own money when I have it,” she said. Convenience is also a factor: instead of taking a bus several stops to get to the supermarket, Akpan walks to Fresh Truck.

Health centers and social service agencies across Boston—including Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital, Boston Medical Center HealthNet Plan, and Boston Centers for Youth and Families—underwrite the program, providing vouchers (that work like gift cards) to organizations such as schools, housing developments, and social service agencies to purchase produce from Fresh Truck.

To further its impact, Fresh Truck introduced FreshRx in 2015, a program that accepts “prescription” gift cards from local partners in exchange for produce. Through the program, healthcare partners identify a group of patients who receive a FreshRx card for $10 per week in groceries. Fresh Truck records the patient transactions and sends data back to healthcare providers to help them study outcomes.

To date, the nonprofit has sold more than $100,000 in fresh food through the FreshRx program.

Building on a Nationwide Trend

Supermarkets on wheels started popping up almost a decade ago. New York City appears to be one of the first to use mobile markets to improve fresh food access in underserved areas through its Green Carts initiative. Since then, mobile markets have launched in several cities, including Farmshare Austin in Texas and Arcadia’s Mobile Markets in the Washington, D.C. area.

Despite the rising popularity of mobile markets, research on the trend has uncovered mixed results.

A report published after the inaugural year of the Green Carts program found that neighborhood residents relied on the fresh fruit and vegetable vendors for their produce needs and cited convenience and price of produce as the main drivers for purchasing produce from mobile markets.

One United States Department of Agriculture report found that those who shopped at mobile markets ate more fruits and vegetables, but often lacked the motivation to cook or the cooking skills to prepare fresh produce. Other research found that improving access to nutritious foods failed to change purchasing and consumption habits, in part because processed foods are cheaper and more convenient.

Trautwein acknowledges the challenges of creating a new model to improve food access. But he also recognizes the need to bridge the gaps in the system. Food pantries, he argues, offer limited fresh produce, and the fresh fruits and vegetables that are abundant at farmers’ markets are perceived as out-of-reach, pricewise.

In an attempt to avoid the pitfalls that have befallen mobile markets in the past—as well as challenges Fresh Truck had encountered, including building brand awareness and a setup that makes it impossible to sell refrigerated items such as meat and dairy—the startup is constantly evaluating operations and customer needs, which led to the development of cooking education and nutrition literacy programming.

“We would love to see families in a few of our different locations shopping for more nutrient-dense greens—like kale and collard greens and spinach—and less fruit,” Trautwein explained.

To boost sales of under-performing produce, Fresh Truck introduced a Vegetable of the Month program that includes fun facts about the food, simple suggestions to prepare it, and sales to encourage shoppers to purchase the produce. The nonprofit also hosts cooking demonstrations and other special events in conjunction with community partners like the YMCA and Boys and Girls Clubs.

“It’s a long-term play, but we are trying to help our families get to a place where they’re developing a more balanced diet and repertoire of cooking skills,” Trautwein said. “We see part of our job as helping our families shift their habits around how they shop and eat.”

Food Prescriptions

South End Community Health Center has been participating in the FreshRx program since 2016. Patients are given weekly prescriptions for fresh foods, along with a $10 voucher and recommended shopping list from a staff doctor or nutritionist.

“Our approach to healthcare is to address the social determinants of health,” explained chief operating officer Karen van Unen. “By making access to healthy, fresh, low-cost produce available to patients and the larger community, we help to at least minimize one barrier to healthy lifestyles.”

The hope is that subsidizing fresh foods can help address a root cause of nutrition-related illnesses like heart disease and diabetes.

So far, FreshRx has proven popular with patients: Fresh Truck processes more than 110 transactions during its three-hour stop at South End Community Health Center on Friday afternoons, and the average shopper spends an additional $2 (above the value of their prescription voucher) on fresh produce.

Trautwein believes that partnering with healthcare providers and promoting “prescriptions” for fresh foods fuels the narrative that food should be an integrated part of preventive medicine and treatment. Another effort is currently being explored in California that would deliver prescription meals to those with chronic illnesses. In order to expand the “food is medicine” conversation and grow FreshRx’s impact, Trautwein hopes to expand Fresh Truck’s partnerships with local healthcare organizations.

“There is a fascinating shift, a realization that the healthcare sector needs to do more work to contain healthcare costs related to more upstream causes of poor health,” Trautwein said. “Our healthcare stakeholders are really excited about the fact that we’ve introduced this agile, pretty cheap solution to address the fact that people can’t always afford healthy food.”

Photos courtesy of Fresh Truck.

The post A Fresh Idea to Improve Food Access appeared first on Civil Eats.

Earlier this year, The California Food is Medicine Coalition, which is made up of six California nonprofits: Ceres Community Project in Santa Rosa, Mama’s Kitchen in San Diego, Project Open Hand in San Francisco, HealthTrust in San Jose, Food for Thought in Sonoma County, and Project Angel Food in Los Angeles—all groups that for the most part started delivering medically tailored meals during the HIV/AIDS crisis and saw the impact on patients’ quality of life—worked with state Senator Mike McGuire to request funding to pilot the program.

“We’re trying to make the case that high-quality nutritional support in the form of a meal-delivery program to meet the nutritional needs of patients with specific illnesses should be considered a medical intervention without which the patient will not do nearly as well,” said Cathryn Couch, executive director of Ceres Project. “This kind of work is being done in other states and we’re behind.”

If the coalition’s request for $9 million in funding over three years is approved, it would be the first multi-organization, multi-county, multi-disease pilot in the country—and it could have a significant impact on healthcare costs and health outcomes.

[Update: On June 27, Governor Jerry Brown signed the state’s budget that included $2 million in funding for the California Food is Medicine Coalition. The groups are determining their research design and plan to launch the program on January 1, 2018.]

Earlier work in Philadelphia, led by the nonprofit MANNA and documented in a 2013 study published in the Journal of Primary Care and Community Health, showed promising results. After delivering three medically tailored meals per day to 65 patients with different chronic illnesses for six months, researchers found that the healthcare costs for those patients dropped from $38,937 per month to $28,183 per month, and were 55 percent lower than the healthcare costs of a comparison group. The frequency of hospital admissions and length of hospital stays also declined.

A healthful and diverse diet, say these groups, can work wonders to bring patients back to health. “With our model, you don’t have to wait years to see results,” said MANNA CEO Sue Daugherty. “With hypertension, we can see the results in one month; with A1C [a blood test for average blood glucose], we can see the results in three months.”

Food Heals

MANNA, like many members of the Food is Medicine Coalition, started delivering meals to those living with HIV/AIDS in the 1990s. The program expanded over time and, in 2014, thanks to a partnership with local insurer Health Partners Plans, MANNA started tailoring meals for 80 different health conditions ranging from cancer and kidney disease to diabetes and HIV/AIDS.

The dietician-designed menus offered by Ceres Project feature dishes such as mushroom quiche, chickpea burgers, lentil soup, fish stew, and pasta with summer vegetables.

Preparations are further tailored to specific illnesses. Meals for diabetes patients would have fewer carbohydrates while meals for patients with heart disease would limit sodium and saturated fats. All meals are based around fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and high quality proteins.

Groups also allow for dietary modifications. MANNA, for example, provides pureed meals for those who struggle to chew or swallow, low spice meals, low lactose, and seafood-free meals for those with allergies.

A 2016 study found that home-delivered, medically tailored meals helped cancer patients decrease fatigue, eat more nutritiously, and live more independently.

And the Harvard Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation has reported that medically tailored meals help lower blood glucose levels, reduce the number of hospitalizations and ER visits, and increase medication adherence among those with diabetes. Harvard’s study also showed that providing three meals per day for six months costs less than a single night of hospitalization.

The opportunity to improve health outcomes helped MANNA secure partnerships with three insurers. The nonprofit operates out of a new commercial kitchen with 36 staff members and 4,500 active volunteers to deliver meals to roster of 1,000 clients who receive 1 million meals annually.

“There is finally recognition that a prescription diet is just as important as prescription medications,” Daugherty says.

Statewide Support

While MANNA secures its funding through a number of channels including contracts with insurers, individual donations, foundations, and corporate giving, the Food is Medicine Coalition hopes to have funding embedded into the state budget and will then allocate resources to patients receiving public health insurance through Medi-Cal, California’s implementation of Medicaid.

According to Couch, the program has the support of the California Department of Public Health, California Department of Healthcare Services, and other key stakeholders.

The Department of Public Health declined to comment on pending legislation, but a spokesperson said in a statement: “For those individuals diagnosed with chronic disease such as diabetes and heart disease, proper nutrition can be a key component of treatment.”

Couch believes the intervention is critical for supporting patients but admits there are still logistics to work out.

The goal is to have Medi-Cal refer patients to local organizations such as Mama’s Kitchen and Project Open Hand, which can deliver the meals in their respective counties.

As part of the pilot, the coalition will track healthcare utilization and health outcomes before, during, and after the intervention. Couch estimates that a $9 million investment would shave $19 million in healthcare costs during the first year of the program.

“We’re talking about patients who have to decide whether to pay for their medications or their utilities,” Couch says. “This is a population without any food support and the sooner we can demonstrate the positive outcomes to healthcare utilization and insurance costs, the sooner we can show that it makes sense to include medically tailored meal deliveries as an essential health benefit.”

Thanks to their dogged determination, the coalition received good news: In June, members of the state Senate approved $6 million over three years to pilot the program. While the Assembly did not include funding in its budget, the joint Conference Committee on the Budget voted to include the funding in the final budget. The budget is expected to be ratified today, and will go to the governor’s desk soon after. There is still a chance Brown could veto the expenditure, but Couch is hopeful.

“It’s such a small amount of money compared to the overall healthcare budget in California,” she said. “Even if it doesn’t go through this year, we’ll be back in 2018. We’ve come too far to give up now.”

Photo courtesy of the Ceres Community Project.

The post Bringing Healing Meals to the Chronically Ill in California appeared first on Civil Eats.

“I became disenchanted watching the same people come back week after week,” says the 41-year-old former software sales executive. “Giving them food was not solving the problem; I wanted to do something to empower people to feed themselves.”

Rather than handing out nonperishable foods, Mauro believed he could have a more powerful impact using the buy one, give one model pioneered by companies like the shoe maker TOMS and the eyeglass company Warby Parker to help people grow their own food.

In 2015, Mauro founded Mauro Seed Company. The concept is simple: For every package of beet, broccoli, kale, collard, carrot, or other open-pollinated, non-GMO vegetable seeds purchased, the startup donates a package to partner organizations, including churches, school gardens, and international outreach missions both in the United States and abroad. The company aims to work with partners committed to teaching members of their communities how to plant and manage gardens.

“Seeds have the greatest ability to feed most people at the lowest cost,” Mauro says. “The seeds we gave [to our partners] last year will continue to produce food for years to come.”

To carry out the work, Mauro converted his basement into company headquarters and partnered with Tennessee seed growers to source the seeds. With the help of his wife, children, and three part-time employees, he packages the seeds in his home and ships them to customers and nonprofit partners around the world. He conducts sales exclusively through the company website.

So far, Mauro Seed Company is making a mark with its mission. In 2016—its first full year in business—it donated enough seeds to grow one million pounds of food to partner organizations that teach others to grow their own food.

Tennessee-based nonprofit cul2vate was one of the first partner organizations to benefit from a donation. Last summer, the nonprofit used the seeds to grow food on its two-and-a-half-acre site as part of a farmer training program for the chronically unemployed. Cul2vate also gave seeds to low-income members of the local community who wanted to start their own gardens.

“The seed donation allows us to focus our financial resources on curriculum development and training,” explains cul2vate executive director Joey Lankford.

This year, Mauro Seed Company is doubling its giving goal and hopes to sell enough $3 seed packets to donate the equivalent of two million pounds of food.

Buy One, Give One Models

Around the country, several other buy one, give one seed companies have realized success in recent years. In New York, Bentley Seed Company introduced a Give & Grow program in 2014. For each packet of seeds purchased through one of its dealers, the 40-year-old company donates a packet of its non-GMO seeds to partner non-profit organizations that offer garden classes. In its first year, the Give & Grow program donated 10,000 packets of seeds.

Finney Farm in Concrete, Washington, also operates a similar program, donating about 8,000 packages of seed each year.

While the popularity of altruistic seed donations appears to be growing, the model is not without its critics. TOMS, the pioneer of the buy one, give one model, has come under fire for, among other things, displacing local shoemakers and providing a Band-Aid solution instead of addressing the root cause of the problem in the process of donating 60 million pairs of shoes.

While the seed giveaway model is still too small and niche to attract attention from critics, Mauro understands the criticism, but unlike shoes, he points out, seeds can be saved and used indefinitely to address global hunger. Moreover, he believes, donating seeds—as opposed to food—empowers recipients to grow their own food as opposed to relying on others for donations.

“Once the giver disappears, the gift continues giving,” Mauro says.

Seeking Partners that Share the Mauro Vision

Fortunately for Mauro, the interest in growing fruits and vegetables is at an all-time high. In 2016, Americans spent $3.6 billion growing food, with Millennials making up more than 80 percent of new food gardeners, according to the National Gardening Survey.

“We’re not getting grandpa who’s been buying seeds for 30 years and is loyal to big seed companies,” Mauro explains. “Our focus is the younger generation who are growing their first gardens and inclined to support a company for its values as well as its products.”

Still, Mauro has discovered that executing his vision has its challenges. Mauro vets each potential partner organization through an application and interview process and has found identifying partners challenging.

“We’re about more than just getting seeds into the hands of people who need them,” Mauro says. “It’s been difficult to find partners that are able to provide the knowledge, training, and education to empower people to grow their own food.”

Mauro Seed Company sends about 75 percent of its donated seeds abroad through organizations like Foundations for Farming in Zimbabwe and Semilla Nueva in Guatemala. The reason, according to Mauro, is that there is more focus on educating people to grow their own food in developing countries.

In the U.S., most of Mauro’s partners use the seeds to grow fresh vegetables for those in need rather than teaching them to grow their own food.

“These groups are doing important work, and we’re not [opposed to] their approach, but it’s not the core of our mission,” Mauro says.

Grow Appalachia, based out of Berea, Kentucky, is a proponent of the seed company’s approach. One of the few U.S. partners that aligns almost exactly with Mauro’s central mission, the organization promotes self-sufficiency by teaching residents of rural Appalachia to garden. Founded in 2009, Grow Appalachia has helped more than 14,000 gardeners grow almost three million pounds of food over the last eight years.

“Learning to grow food is about more than a meal,” explains director David Cooke. “It’s giving people control over one element of their destiny.”

Under a new partnership with the Mauro Seed Company, the nonprofit has received over 400 pounds of bean, pea, corn, cucumber, cabbage, squash, and watermelon seeds that will produce hundreds of thousands of pounds of food for program participants. In addition to being used in educational gardening programs, the seeds will be given to participants to use at home.

The donation, according to Cooke, will free up resources to offer classes and purchase equipment like hoses and hand tools that residents of the economically depressed rural communities could not otherwise afford. “Seeds are one part of the entire system,” Cooke says. “You have to know what to do with them and have the tools to maintain them. We can focus on that if we’re not worried about paying for the seeds.”

Mauro hopes to support an increasing number of nonprofits like Growing Appalachia and cul2vate and to double sales—and donations—in 2017. But he insists he’s not trying to build his company into a brand that will compete with major players like Johnny’s Selected Seeds or Burpee.

“We’re not trying to be the biggest, but we are trying to have the biggest impact,” he says.

Photos courtesy of Mauro Seed Company.

The post Seeding a Need: How a Seed Company Doubles its Impact appeared first on Civil Eats.

The opening of the Regions Field baseball stadium in 2013, however, kicked off a comeback for Birmingham’s city center. Developers are now showing interest in the downtown district, renovating historic buildings and snapping up vacant land to build arts and entertainment venues, hotels, and apartments.

The boom is luring people downtown to live. Between 2010 and 2014, the downtown population increased 58 percent, and in September, the Census Bureau ranked Birmingham second in the nation (behind Nashville) for cities with the fastest-growing median incomes.

Ask Deon Gordon what’s behind the revitalization of Birmingham’s once-neglected urban core and he’ll talk about food.

Establishing farmers’ markets, community gardens and improving access to fresh and locally grown foods will energize the city, says Gordon, who directs business growth for the nonprofit economic development organization REV Birmingham. These projects are especially important for downtown Birmingham, a neighborhood the USDA declared a food desert.

“Birmingham’s had a lot of slow starts and stumbles on the path to revitalization,” says Gordon. “The revitalization of our city is, in so many ways, food based.”

Chef Abhi Sainju, owner of MO:MO, a food stall that will serve Nepalese dumplings and Vietnamese-inspired sandwiches in the food hall.

Food Hall and the Modern-Day Food Court

An establishment called Food Hall is part of that revitalization.

Located in the historic Pizitz Building, which has been vacant since 1988, Food Hall is part of a $70 million mixed-use project that includes commercial space and residential space, including 143 apartments.

Opening this month, it will include three restaurants and 19 food stalls serving a diverse mix of foods, including burgers, ramen noodles, Ethiopian cuisine, and Mexican ice cream, in a range of price points. And some of the companies—Alabama Biscuit Company, Revelator Coffee Company and Lichita’s (Mexican ice cream—source their ingredients locally.

“The Food Hall is, in my opinion, a catalyst,” Gordon says. He believes it is helping, “create vibrancy in our historic commercial district that had turned into a neighborhood where no one wanted to be.”

Modern food courts like Food Hall bring together multiple vendors and provide space in high traffic areas—often in renovated historic buildings—that would otherwise be too expensive for small restaurants and food entrepreneurs, creating destinations for local food.

The San Francisco Ferry Building, which opened in 2003, is one of the first of these projects—and remains one of the most iconic. Countless others have followed its lead: In 2014, The Packing House opened in downtown Anaheim on the site of a former fruit packing and distribution center; a Sears and Roebuck was reimagined as Ponce City Market in Atlanta; and earlier this year, Chicago welcomed Revival Food Hall, a 24,000 square-foot marketplace in the heart of the central business district. Also this year, several developers began construction on food halls in cities like Denver, St. Louis, and Memphis.

But larger questions remain about whether trendy food halls can serve a wide enough audience, as they’re often seen as playing a role in neighborhood gentrification and rising property rates.

In downtown Birmingham, where more than $1 billion worth of projects have been recently completed, are under construction or being proposed, supporters hope developments like Food Hall will help, not hurt, the local community.

A Vietnamese-inspired sandwich from MO:MO. Photo courtesy of Yellowhammer Creative.

But Alice Evans, executive director of the Birmingham-based Alabama Sustainable Agriculture Network isn’t convinced that Food Hall will improve local food access, noting, “[The vendors] are more upscale than they would need to be to make food accessible from a price perspective,” she says. But she does believe there is potential for the new development to positively impact local farmers.

“The cluster of different restaurants that farms could connect to at the same time could serve as a unified drop-off point. My hope would be that it lowers some of the price point hurdles and other time and capacity hurdles that sometimes keep restaurants from buying from local farms,” she says.

Kathryn Strickland, executive director of the Community Food Bank of Alabama, which serves Birmingham, is a little more optimistic.

“It takes myriad approaches and initiatives to build a local food system,” Strickland says. “Food halls are great vehicles for new food entrepreneurs to get low-cost space in high-density, high-traffic areas and promote job creation and, ultimately, impact poverty and create opportunities where there were none.”

Working Together to Improve Food Access

Earlier this year, IBM chose Birmingham as one of 16 cities around the world to receive $500,000 in technical assistance through its Smart Cities Challenge Grant to identify and develop systems aimed at eliminating food deserts.

The Urban Food Project, an initiative operated through REV Birmingham, is part of the solution. By encouraging corner stores to buy, sell ,and market fresh produce, the Urban Food Project improves healthy food access and the local farmers who make weekly fresh produce deliveries gain new markets for their fruits and vegetables.

For his part, Gordon hopes to facilitate partnerships similar to the Urban Food Project between local farmers and participants in Reveal Kitchen, the food incubator in Food Hall.

As part of the program, the REV Birmingham-operated incubator will host up-and-coming chefs and food entrepreneurs for four to six months, offering a fully equipped 350 square-foot space in Food Hall along with education and mentoring to those who might not otherwise have a shot at opening their own businesses.

“The emphasis is on market validation; we want them to use it as a springboard to their own bricks-and-mortar locations,” Gordon says.

He hopes that the entrepreneurs who are successful will go on to hire staff and establish relationships with farmers and food service companies to source ingredients, further supporting local economic development.

“Our goal is to create vibrancy in our historic commercial district and help Birmingham get its swagger back,” Gordon says.

The post Access or Gentrification—Can a Food Hall Transform a Food Desert? appeared first on Civil Eats.

In a call with reporters, Stabenow described the act as an important document, “To start the conversation and create the broad support I think we will have in including urban farming as part of the next Farm Bill.”

The bill aims to create economic opportunities for urban farmers, expand U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) farm loan programs to urban farmers, support the creation of urban farm co-ops to help bring products to market (and allow those co-ops to manage loans for urban farmers), invest in urban ag research, and improve access to fresh, local foods.

The bill is long overdue, according to Malik Yakini, executive director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, the nonprofit that operates D-Town Farm, the Detroit farm where Stabenow announced the legislation.

“Overall, I think the bill is progressive and it’s a significant step forward that Senator Stabenow is recognizing the importance of urban agriculture,” Yakini says.

Whether the legislation will make it into the final 2018 Farm Bill is yet to be seen. But if it does, it would be the first time urban farmers have been included in the federal legislation. And it could provide important protections for urban farm businesses in the case of bad weather, disasters, and market shifts.

Wes King, policy specialist for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC), points to the provision that would provide the USDA the ability to allow urban farmers to use contract and local pricing to recover losses as part of the non-insured disaster assistance program.

“Currently, the coverage uses national commodity prices to reimburse farmers,” King explains. “This works for farmers who get commodity prices for their crops, but in urban agriculture, farmers sell direct-to-consumer or high-end restaurants and are getting premium prices, not commodity prices.”

As part of the bill, Stabenow has also advocated for the creation of an office of urban agriculture under the USDA. The office would coordinate urban agriculture policies and offer technical assistance.

“The legislation is all anchored in the creation of this office, which will act as a force to coordinate urban farming activities and research and ensure that whatever is included in the Farm Bill will be properly implemented,” says King.

But Yakini worries that the advisory committee overseeing the new office might not be representative of all urban farmers. “There has been a historic marginalization of Black farmers,” he explains. “I hope that the committee that appoints the advisory board recognizes that, but we won’t know until we get there.”

The bill authorizes up to a total of $860 million over 10 years in new investments for urban agriculture, a potentially sizable chunk of the overall farm bill pie.

Tyson Gersh, president of Detroit-based Michigan Urban Farming Initiative says, “It’s been difficult for urban farmers to take advantage of funding opportunities to support their work because [funding] is designed around traditional agriculture.”

To get by, many urban farmers have either taken advantage of “borrowed” land and built infrastructure from free and found materials or engaged in public-private partnerships. The struggle for farms that fall somewhere in the middle could be eased through more federal funding. “A new resource platform could enable the spectrum to be more fully populated,” says Gersh.

Indeed, the bill recognizes the diversity of urban farming operations and includes a specific provision to improve access to USDA farm programs like technical assistance, loans and insurance, and uses conservation grants to support access to land and production sites for farmers operating rooftop or vertical farms.

The nod to urban food production ought to be welcome news for operations like Bright Farms, Detroit’s Hantz Farm, and Square Roots, a Kimbal Musk-backed urban farming accelerator to help millennials launch vertical farming operations.

During the press call, Stabenow acknowledged that the funding for these initiatives would come from expanding existing loan programs, which could cause urban farmers to compete with other farmers for the same pot of funding.

“We don’t want to take funding away from traditional rural farmers,” Yakini says. “This is not urban ag versus rural ag.”

Stabenow explained the need to expand funding opportunities, noting, “If we can make [loans and risk management tools] available then other bankers will be more willing to participate with our urban farmers.”

But Gersh fears that the wrong type of funding could have a deleterious effect.

“I’d rather see resources allocated toward self sufficiency,” he says. “I’d hate to see our entire industry disappear overnight when the bills that provided the funding to create all of this growth are overturned and the funding disappears.”

Karen Washington also has concerns about the dollars and cents of the proposed legislation. The urban farming activist and farmer/founder of Rise & Root Farm in New York is concerned that the bill emphasizes profit-driven farming rather than urban food access.

“Urban agriculture should be in the Farm Bill … and the fact that [this bill] is even part of the conversation is huge,” she says. “But the heart of this bill cannot be profit-driven. A lot of the emphasis is on the commercialization of urban agriculture. This is not just about profit. Race economics have to be brought into the conversation.”

Yakini also expresses concern about the potential negative impacts of the bill on people of color. He’s particularly concerned by the prospect of funding for this bill coming out of the nutrition portion—which accounts for the large majority—of the farm bill “We do not want to see this bill funded by reducing SNAP benefits,” he says

There are, indeed, kinks to be worked out.

On the press call, Stabenow acknowledged the bill has little chance of passing in its current form. But, it could make waves regardless.

For starters, it could sway city and state-level lawmakers who are on the fence about updating dated legal language that puts urban farmers at odds with municipalities.

“[The bill] provides good opportunities for the federal government to step in and tell cities, ‘We’ve done the research and you’re obliged to give it a chance,’” Gersh says.

For Karen Washington, the message the proposed bill sends is a step in the right direction.

“Until now, no one has taken growing food in cities seriously,” she says. “We’ve had to fight to make our way, making something out of nothing while people treated [urban farming] like it was a hobby. This bill validates that urban farming is not going away and needs to be an important part of the conversation.”

The post Will This New Bill Level the Playing Field for Urban Farms? appeared first on Civil Eats.

“The motivation of Big Ag is to feed the largest number of people at the lowest cost [and] it has led to cheap meat that is bland and tasteless,” he explains. “We want to show people that it’s possible to have an alternative source of meat production that is good for the chickens, good for the farmers, and good for consumers.”

Solomon launched Emmer & Co. in 2015 with the goal of changing the commercial poultry industry.

At first blush, the San Francisco startup follows the same model used in almost all commercial poultry production: Farmers sign a contract to “grow” the chickens—the industry term for raising poultry—earning a fee for each flock while the company owns the chickens and manages all aspects of the supply chain from processing and distribution to sales and marketing.

But unlike other “Big Poultry” agreements where chickens are housed in cramped barns, bred for fast growth, raised on vegetarian diets, and sent to slaughter at eight weeks old, Emmer & Co. insists that its birds are raised in small flocks, on pasture, with access to insects and grubs and room to roam.

All of the birds in the Emmer & Co. flock are heritage breeds, a term coined by the American Poultry Association to refer to birds whose genetics can be traced back multiple generations. These slow-growing chickens, which include breeds like New Hampshire, Plymouth Rock, and Buff Orpington, don’t reach market weight for at least 16 weeks (or twice as long as standard meat birds, which generally only grow for eight weeks).

“Sixty years ago, these were the only kinds of chickens you could buy from a farmer or in the supermarket,” says Solomon. “It’s exciting to us to think about new ways of operating to get back to a system of eating the right chickens raised the right way.”

The demand for these old fashioned birds is growing says Jeannette Beranger, research and technical programs manager for The Livestock Conservancy, a nonprofit organization working to save endangered breeds of livestock and poultry from extinction. “Heritage chickens have become popular. Hatcheries sell out of some breeds.”

But it’s still just a drop in the bucket. Currently, farmers under contract with large producers like Tyson Foods and Perdue raise 95 percent of the nation’s meat birds, according to the National Chicken Council.

And the combination of heritage breeds and pasture-based farming model comes with its share of challenges. For starters, heritage breeds are harder to find than standard broilers.

Frank Reese, a farmer in Kansas who sells up to 500 heritage birds every six weeks through Emmer & Co., works with two additional farmers in the Midwest to raise breeding stock that can be supplied to contracted growers.

Tyler Dawley is one of those contracted growers. Dawley started out raising Cornish Cross broilers, the fast-growing breed favored by most poultry producers, on his California farm, Big Bluff Ranch, in 2009. He raised and processed the chickens and sold the meat direct-to-consumer through farmers’ markets and community supported agriculture subscriptions (CSAs). As the popularity of the pasture-raised poultry grew, the farm reached the limit of its processing capabilities, which also limited farm income.

Dawley wanted a partner to manage the supply chain, but did not want to transition the farm to a typical production facility complete with climate-controlled chicken houses and cramped quarters for his birds.

“I wanted them to be able to express their chicken-ness,” he says, referring to an oft-cited term coined by Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm.

Enter Emmer & Co.

Solomon wanted Red Bluff Farm to maintain its pasture-based model, even insisted on it. But Solomon did require one change before signing a contract with the farm: It needed to agree to grow heritage breeds in separate pastures from the Cornish Cross birds.

As part of the partnership, Red Bluff Farm now processes up to 600 chickens per week for Emmer & Co. It’s a fraction of the 2,300 Cornish Cross broilers Dawley raises under a contract with a local food service distributor, but he is confident that working with the startup will be instrumental in helping him scale production of heritage breeds—and, in the process—revolutionize poultry production.

“Changing the poultry industry is not as quixotic as it sounds,” Dawley says.

But that doesn’t mean it’s simple. Beranger believes a startup like Emmer & Co. faces four major barriers to scaling production: Hatcheries are not producing enough certified heritage breeds; growers are often too small to benefit from cost and production efficiencies; independent USDA-certified processing facilities are disappearing; and consumers are used to cheap meat.

“It’s going to take time to build a significant enough market for heritage birds for producers to scale,” she says.

To date, Emmer & Co. has contracted with four farmers who process nearly 125,000 birds annually under contracts with the startup—with plans to double that number in 2017.

Solomon believes that as production increases, the company will be able to negotiate better contracts with processors, warehouses, and fulfillment centers, which will address the other significant challenge: price.

Raising heritage birds on pasture is more expensive then packing broilers into chicken houses (where the birds move around less and eat much less feed), which translates into higher prices for consumers.

Emmer & Co. sells chickens through online retailers like Vital Choice and Williams Sonoma via its website; whole chickens retail for $44.50—that’s three times what an organic chicken in the grocery store costs. But these higher prices translate to higher wages for farmers. Dawley notes that his gross earnings are less than when Red Bluff Farm sold direct-to-consumer, but the net returns are higher.

As demand continues to expand and companies like Emmer & Co. continue expanding production to reach scale, prices may go down. But, according to Beranger, “it’s a slow road.”

While it’s still early in the evolution of the model, Solomon—and the growers he contracts with to raise heritage breed birds—have high hopes.

“In the context of the big chicken industry, the quantity of birds we’re talking about is nothing,” Solomon says. But he adds, “As we boost efficiencies in the supply chain and bring more farmers into the network, we’ll be able to scale operations and have a bigger impact on the industry.”

“If I didn’t think it was doable, I wouldn’t be doing it,” adds Dawley. “I believe there is a market for a new way of growing chickens.”

The post This Company Wants to Bring Heritage Chicken to the Masses appeared first on Civil Eats.

Namely, women tend to farm on smaller pieces of land, grow diverse crops, favor sustainable practices, and prioritize food over commodity crops.

In their new book, The Rise of Women Farmers and Sustainable Agriculture, a quintet of authors—Carolyn Sachs, Mary E. Barbercheck, Kathyrn Brasier, Nancy Ellen Kiernan, and Rachel Terman—take a close look at two trends happening simultaneously: an increase in the number of women farmers and a growing demand for sustainable agriculture.

Terman took time to share some insights into the trends and what she learned while researching the topic.

Why did you all decide to write about this topic?

We wanted to discuss the influential role that women farmers are playing in agriculture and look at how these two trends have come together and impacted each other. We also wanted to highlight the voices of women in agriculture and share their stories. The information in the book is based on 10 years of research with the Pennsylvania Women’s Agricultural Network.

Why focus on women in agriculture?

The census data was compelling. [Until 2002, the U.S. Department of Agriculture only allowed one principal operator to be counted; in most cases, a man claimed the title.] When the data collection changed, it allowed more women to claim the status of “farmer.” Over the last decade, the role women play in broader society has changed; more women are taking on identities as business owners and professionals. Because of this, there are more women who have been able to get into farming and we wanted to look at what role women are playing on the farm and how it was impacting agriculture.

What, if anything, makes women and men different as farmers?

Women tend to have less land to work with and less access to the labor and capital needed to get their operations up and running. For this reason, we’re seeing more women pursuing opportunities in sustainable and organic farming where they can farm on smaller pieces of land with less equipment. Women are also putting together farms in different ways than conventional agriculture. Their operations are more diversified and often include educational components.

Women have also been really good at developing networks of women farmers to share information. Learning how to farm and create business models can be overwhelming for new farmers. In other scenarios, farmers may be reticent to share information about their businesses, but we found that women who were successful farmers were willing to open up about what worked and didn’t. This kind of peer-to-peer networking has been an important innovation for women farmers.

In the book you write, “A profound shift is occurring among women working in agriculture—they are increasingly seeing themselves as farmers, not only as the wives or daughters of farmers.” Why do you think the shift has occurred?

The women’s equality movement has helped acknowledge the different types of work that women do on the farm and women are stepping into that role more so now than ever before. They are really claiming the role, saying, “I am the farmer.” Even though we’re starting to acknowledge the numbers of women farming, I don’t know that the work they’ve done, especially in developing sustainable agriculture, has been acknowledged very widely.

What was the most surprising thing you learned while researching the book?

I learned so much. I was most impressed by the innovative strategies women were using to stake their claims as farmers.

One of the women [featured in the book] has an urban farm and also developed an educational program for kids; she was able to get nonprofit status because of the educational aspect of the farm. Creating a business model that combines farming and growing vegetables with community and education helped open up opportunities for the farm. Another farmer coordinated with her local township to farm on community land. Without that creative idea, she might not have been able to access land.

I don’t want to paint a broad stroke, but it does seem like the women involved in sustainable agriculture are especially interested in multiple factors involved in farming like the environment, health, food, nutrition, and how the farm is connected to the community and the community is connected to the farm. It’s a different balance of priorities than we see in [male-dominated] conventional agriculture.

What impact do you hope this book will have?

We hope that the book will encourage more women to be leaders in agriculture and hope that it helps people involved in agricultural organizations and institutions to support women farmers and develop resources and programming to best serve women in agriculture. We also hope that others find the stories of women farmers to be inspiring.

The post How Women Farmers are Changing U.S. Agriculture appeared first on Civil Eats.

“Spaces that have gardens have a different atmosphere than vacant lots,” notes Anne Palmer, program director for Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future.

But are these farms good for more than turning urban blight into tomato blossoms? A new report suggests that many of us might be seeing the benefits of urban farming through rose-colored glasses.

The Center for a Livable Future reviewed 167 studies on urban agriculture (looking mainly at community gardens) and found mixed results. First, the good news: The research links urban farming to better access to fresh foods (at lower prices), potential reduced greenhouse gas emissions and improved carbon sequestration, workforce training opportunities, increased property values, and opportunities for community involvement.

Tyson Gersh, co-founder and farm manager at the Michigan Urban Farming Initiative in Detroit, has seen many of these benefits firsthand. The farm Gersh runs provides low-income residents and food pantries with fresh fruits and vegetables they probably wouldn’t have access to otherwise. Although the farm has produced more than 50,000 pounds on just one-acre of city land over the past four seasons, Gersh recognizes that is a drop in the bucket when it comes to how much food is needed by a city the size of Detroit.

“The real benefits of urban farming are engaging communities and revitalizing neighborhoods,” he says. “We can make a big impact on a small number of people but urban agriculture is not going to end hunger,” he says. “It’s not intuitive at all.”

The Johns Hopkins report supports this notion, reporting that gardens often serve more as de facto neighborhood centers than hubs of commercial agricultural production. The researchers noted, “Some neighbors of urban forms discuss the community improvement benefits … with more enthusiasm than the production of fresh local food.”

Producing enough food to make an impact on the needs of urban dwellers is a big challenge of urban agriculture. On a global level, the Worldwatch Institute reports that up to 20 percent of the world’s food is grown in urban areas. But it’s unclear whether the U.S. will ever meet that number.

The Hopkins researchers point to one study in New York which found that transforming all suitable vacant land into urban farms would only yield enough fresh produce to feed between 103,000 and 160,000 residents—a small percentage of the city’s 8.4 million residents.

The other challenges cited in the report include a less efficient use of resources, poor soil management practices, and health risks associated with airborne pollutants, as well as the potential for food grown on urban farms to be sold outside the neighborhood or at prices local residents couldn’t afford.

“We often hear people saying, ‘We’re going to rebuild the city, create jobs, and feed people [through urban farms]’ and these things are, in my opinion, largely aspirational,” says Palmer. “It makes me uncomfortable that these groups are devoting a lot of energy and resources to something that might not be a panacea.”

Palmer also admits that this report is based on incomplete data. “It’s a new field and there isn’t a lot of data,” notes Che Axum, director for the Center for Urban Agriculture and Gardening Education at the University of the District of Columbia. “If we want to move urban agriculture forward, we need to engage farmers and collect data. Without it, the folks at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other organizations aren’t going to fund or prioritize it.”

Palmer agrees. She insists that although the report found significant challenges with the model, it was not intended to discourage urban agriculture. In fact, she wants everyone, including those interested in starting urban farms, to understand the impacts—both positive and negative—of growing food in cities.

“We don’t want it to be the thing people point to and say, ‘This doesn’t work,’” she says. “Urban agriculture could be really important to the food system but we don’t have the information we need right now to measure that.”

Research aside, Palmer admits, “Growing food is such a powerful act. Growing your own food is transformative—and that is something I don’t think you could capture in any study.”

The post Urban Farms Bring Us Together, but Can They Feed Enough of Us? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Unlike the Beacon Food Forest in Seattle, Clifton Park Food Forest in Baltimore, and other similar efforts located in public parks or public land, Swale is built on a barge. Occupying the equivalent of one tenth of an acre, the barge will be planted with mature persimmon and paw-paw trees, gooseberries, autumn olives, chives, artichokes, Swiss chard, tomatoes, and dozens of other varieties of fruits, vegetables, herbs, and nuts that visitors are invited to harvest and eat, free of charge. Swale will dock at six ports along the Hudson River, including Governors Island, Yankee Pier, and Brooklyn Bridge Park, spending at least one month in each.

“On land, we would have been more localized, working in one area with one community,” explains Swale founder Mary Mattingly. “Because we can travel, we can reach a lot more people and generate a lot more excitement.”

To date, the nonprofit behind the project has raised $32,000—about half of the funding it needs—through individual donations and grants from nonprofit foundations and launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise the remaining funds.

Dozens of farming, gardening, urban revitalization, and arts organizations are collaborating to get the 100 by 30 foot barge on the water, including the New York Foundation for the Arts (the project’s fiscal sponsor), the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Experimental Farm Network, the Land Institute, and Stuyvesant High School.

Sean Walsh, owner of the New Jersey-based edible landscape company AppleSeed Permaculture, is one of the collaborators assisting with design and plant sourcing. He hopes Swale can help more people think about growing food in underutilized spaces under unpredictable circumstances.

“We’ve adopted specific methodologies for growing food in modern culture but with the threat of rising sea levels and climate change, we’ll be dealing with more issues of agriculture adaptability,” Walsh explains. “We have a lot to learn about how food production can regenerate the landscape; this kind of experimental education will help.”

Mattingly—an artist who has built a number of ecosystems and mobile environments, including the other floating art Waterpod and WetLand—admits there will be challenges to growing food on a barge. For starters, salt spray could damage the plants and saltwater must be purified before it can be used for irrigation. But the forest’s design will create a saltwater marsh around the edge of the barge and then that will help clean and desalinate water from the Hudson River that will go on to irrigate the other crops. Salt-tolerant plants like tomatoes and artichokes will them go inside the initial perimeter.

If all goes as planned, Mattingly says Swale could produce up to 6,000 pounds of food in its first year—a harvest comparable to traditional food forests of similar size.

“We want to turn what could be challenges into positives,” she says. And that approach extends beyond the growing conditions.

When the barge docks in each port, Swale organizers hope to partner with community groups like Dewitt Clinton High School in the Bronx and the library, farmers’ market, and parks department in New Rochelle to work on establishing permanent food forests on public lands—which is currently prohibited in New York.

Because the rules for foraging on public lands do not extend to the water, Swale hopes to encourage visitors to pick and eat the foods growing on the barge, giving the uninitiated a true taste of the benefits of food forests during guided tours and onboard workshops.

“The critics are skeptical that laws will change and believe that we’re doing this too soon,” says Mattingly. But she thinks the time is right to start focusing on changing policy.

“There are a lot of old laws on the books that restrict growing public food in public spaces,” she adds. “We want to create support to change policies and have public food incorporated into the urban plan.”

At its core, the floating food forest is more than an agricultural experiment—it’s a political statement. Between mouthfuls of berries and bites of paw paws, Mattingly hopes the edible landscape will help New Yorkers rethink public food access.

Walsh agrees. “Swale will help elevate conversations and get people thinking about how we can approach problems in our food system from a vastly different perspective than we did in the past,” he says.

The post A Floating Food Forest Sets Sail in New York City appeared first on Civil Eats.

Since 2014, this 1,120 square foot vertical farm has been the source for up to 80 percent of the fresh produce served in the arena’s club level restaurants and executive suites. On game nights, this can mean feeding up to 5,000 Tampa Bay Lightning fans, and those in charge hope to see that number rise.

“We were getting a lot of feedback from fans who wanted more fresh options,” says Darryl Benge, executive vice president and general manager at Amalie Arena. “It’s been successful in our premium spaces, now we’re trying to figure out how to scale it and bring it to regular concessions.”

Amalie is not an anomaly. Fans at Levi’s Stadium and AT&T Park in San Francisco, Nationals Park in Washington, DC, and Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore can now also nosh on local foods while cheering on their favorite teams.

As the trend gains fans, more arenas are looking for opportunities to incorporate farms alongside baseball fields, basketball courts, and hockey rinks.

Golden 1 Center in Sacramento and Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta—both under construction—also plan to emphasize local foods. In Atlanta, raised beds will produce fruits and vegetables for Falcons fans; in Sacramento, 90 percent of the foods served in the concessions at Golden 1 Center will be sourced from more than 750 local farmers, ranchers, and artisanal food producers within a 150-mile radius of the stadium.

“From the start, the arena project has been about celebrating the region and creating something that is uniquely Sacramento,” says Michael Tuohy, executive chef and general manager for Legends Hospitality at the Golden 1 Center.

Ninety miles west, the trend has already taken root in the Bay Area. In 2014, Bon Appétit Management Company (BAMCO) partnered with San Francisco Giants to establish The Garden at AT&T Park in San Francisco. The 4,300 square foot garden behind the centerfield wall, tended by Farmscape Gardens, produces dozens of varieties of fruits, vegetables, and herbs. In a show of team spirit, the garden manager plants black and orange tomatoes and edible flowers to match the S.F. Giants’ colors.

The Garden, accessible to all ticketholders and open two hours before the first pitch, has two concessions: Hearth Table serves traditional ballpark fare like flatbread pizza and all-beef hot dogs made with ingredients grown onsite, and Garden Table is a vegetarian restaurant using produce harvested from the garden in smoothies, salads, and soups.

“You might want a hot dog and garlic fries at one game and a salad and a smoothie at the next one,” says Hannah Schmunk, community development manager for BAMCO. “We wanted to let fans know that the park has options for everyone.”

Although fan demand is the major driver of the farm-to-stadium trend, it also presents the biggest challenge.

Tampa’s Amalie Arena invested $30,000 to build its hydroponic farm, taking advantage of an unused space near the loading dock to construct 125 towers with 3,000 growing spaces, or about the equivalent of one acre of land. In peak production, the farm barely grows enough produce to meet the demand in its club-level restaurants and executive suites; expanding the size of the farm to serve all of its concessions—which Benge hopes to do—will require a lot of creativity and a significant renovation.

And, in an arena that serves more than 20,000 fans, supplementing the farm’s produce with vegetables from local producers is also a challenge. In fact, most of the farmers Benge approached about supplying produce for restaurants and concessions at Amalie Arena couldn’t meet the demand.

“We knew going in that we’d have to deal with production issues,” he says. “It’s a learning curve.”

For Tuohy in Sacramento, designing a menu that combines stadium classics fans have come to expect with unique offerings that emphasize local ingredients at the Golden 1 Center has been a challenge.

“We need to have the fresh produce for locally sourced bahn mi and a classic hot dog [made with beef from a local ranch] with all of the fixings,” he says.

At AT&T Stadium in Dallas, food and beverage provider Legends has taken a different approach to sourcing local and organic produce for the 80,000 Dallas Cowboys fans who attend each game. The stadium employs two full-time purchasers who seek out local farmers and ranchers who can meet the demand (such as the We Over Me football field farm at Paul Quinn College). Currently, 10 percent of ingredients come from the local area.

“We work with local producers to manage supply and demand systems and [require] continual communication to know where quantity/quality levels are,” explains George Wasai, director of food and beverage for Legends at AT&T Stadium.

The Garden at AT&T Park doesn’t track the amount of produce it grows—and Schmunk notes it’s a small fraction of the of the amount needed to satisfy Bay Area fans’ appetites for local fare—but the goal was never to focus on production.

“We wanted to be part of this unique form of agriculture that is taking hold with the hope that fans would fall in love with the space and start to value farms and the sources of their foods,” she says.

Photos, from top: Fans dine in The Garden at AT&T Park (SF); The Garden at AT&T Park, Legends at AT&T Stadium (Houston)’s George Wasai and Tony Sinese meet with farmers from We Over Me Farm at Paul Quinn College, one of the Stadium’s local growers, to plan their menu. 

The post Stadiums Score with Farm-to-Game Eats appeared first on Civil Eats.

The butchers-in-training are incarcerated at the Sussex County Community Corrections Center in Georgetown, Delaware. They work in the jail’s meat processing plant as part of a vocational training program.

The corrections center added a meat processing facility in 2009 at the request of the Delaware Department of Natural Resources. The launch of a statewide program to control the local deer population created a need for butchers to process the carcasses (the meat is donated to local food banks). Without enough local meat cutters to meet the demand, the DNR hoped incarcerated people could fill the gap.

“It presented an opportunity for offenders to learn basic butchering skills and develop a work ethic,” explains Joe Adkins, correctional lieutenant for the State of Delaware.

Since training began, more than 160 people have participated in the program, processing up to 100 deer per month in a makeshift butcher shop outfitted with equipment provided by the Delaware Department of Natural Resources.

The program has proven popular; there is a waiting list of more than two dozen men hoping to learn meat processing skills while serving out their sentences in the level 4 facility. But the need for trained butchers extends beyond the barbed wire of a state prison.

Even though the demand for local meat is increasing, the number of butchers is declining nationwide, making it harder to turn cows and pigs into prime cuts of beef and pork. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates a need for more than 16,000 butchers by 2018. And while these programs might train people to be butchers outside prison, they are also currently filling a widening skill gap with very low-cost labor.

Census data indicates that immigrants fill almost one-third of meat processing jobs–the number could be much higher due to the use of undocumented workers. While meat processing pays more than other low-wage food jobs (an average of $13.70 per hour, according to BLS), it’s physically demanding and often dangerous work.

In Minnesota, where an Agricultural Utilization Research Institute survey found that two-thirds of butchers at small meat processing facilities are at retirement age and most have no succession plans in place, Representative Jason Metsa (DFL-Virginia) believes prison inmates can fill the shortage.

Earlier this year, Metsa introduced a bill that would establish a formal curriculum at Northeast Regional Corrections Center in Saginaw, Minnesota, where inmates are already working in an onsite meat processing facility. Farmers in the area, according to representative Metsa, depend on people living in the minimum-security facility to butcher livestock because there are few other resources in their rural area. He told the Minneapolis Star the idea resulted from a need to find, “creative ways to attract more farmers to our area.”

Coupled with the formal curriculum, the Northeast Regional Corrections Center has requested the development of a $1.2 million USDA-inspected meat processing facility on its campus. Representatives declined requests for an interview but the Minneapolis Star article noted that the proposed plant would provide a state-of-the-art training facility and meet the need for USDA-inspected meat processors in the area. (Nationwide, the number of USDA-inspected slaughterhouses dropped from 1,200 in 1990 to 800 in 2010.)

Although there is a need for butchers, prison labor is a complex issue. During incarceration, workers generally earn much less than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. UNICOR, the government agency that manages prison labor, says most inmates earn between 23 cents and $1.15 per hour.

In 2014, Whole Foods was lambasted for selling products produced by inmates, which critics argued provided an unfair advantage over companies required to pay the minimum wage and exploited prisoners who are unable to organize for fair wages and working conditions. Earlier this week, Whole Foods announced that it would stop selling products like tilapia and goat cheese produced through a prison labor program in Colorado.

“It’s a human rights issue,” notes Joann Lo, co-director of the Food Chain Workers Alliance. “Some of these programs have good intention of providing inmates with job skills, but offer none of the respect that people deserve for their labor, namely guaranteeing minimum wage, a choice in how their wages are spent and a voice in their working conditions.”

William Oettel, warden at the Sussex County Community Corrections Center argues that the program is an important step in helping offenders secure employment upon their release. “The training we do here sets them up to get an apprenticeship in a butcher shop or supermarket,” he says.

People working in the butcher shop at Sussex County Community Corrections Center earn minimum wage ($8.25 per hour in Delaware) but the butchers-in-training don’t collect a paycheck at the end of the week. Instead, their wages are applied toward court fees and other fines imposed during their sentencing.

At least two have found full-time jobs in butcher shops, but Adkins notes that the number could be much higher because the prison doesn’t track offenders post-release. Their sentences, which range from 30 to 90 days, are too short to qualify for a vocational certificate, but Adkins hopes that will change.

“For now, we’re teaching them the basics but we’re actively looking for an accelerated curriculum that [inmates] could complete during their sentences,” he says. “We want them to have pride in what they’re doing and a feeling that it could lead to a new path.”

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All of the produce in the basket was grown on an organic farm on the hospital’s Anderson campus in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The hospital—part of a six-campus network—has been running a farm on the 500-acre grounds since 2014.

“Our mission is to provide great healthcare and part of that is educating patients about the benefits of a plant-based, organic diet,” explains Ed Nawrocki, president of the Anderson campus. “One of the best ways to do that is to lead by example and show them how delicious produce grown on our farm tastes.

But it’s not just new moms who benefit from the hospital’s bounty. In its first season, the farm at St. Luke’s grew 12 varieties of vegetables on five acres, producing 44,000 pounds of produce that was served to patients, incorporated into the cafeteria menu, and sold at weekly farmers’ markets on several hospital campuses. This year, the farm expanded to 10 acres and 30 varieties of fruits and vegetables.

Mark “Coach” Smallwood, executive director at the Rodale Institute, the nonprofit organization that worked with St. Luke’s to help get its  farm off the ground, believes there is a growing interest in serving organic, locally grown produce at hospitals.

Some, like the University of Wisconsin Hospital, buy produce from local farms, others allow the community to use land on their campuses for community gardens. Now, a few hospitals are taking the next step, starting farms on hospital campuses. Among them are Stony Brook University Hospital on Long Island and Watertown Regional Medical Center in Wisconsin. Both are now using produce grown onsite to replace fruits and vegetables that are packaged and shipped thousands of miles before reaching patients.

“Hippocrates talked about food as medicine and we believe that to be true,” Smallwood says. “There is a paradigm shift happening and hospitals are realizing the value of producing fresh, local, organic food to serve to their patients.”

St. Joseph Mercy Ann Arbor Hospital in Ypsilanti, Michigan, planted the first crops on a 10-acre onsite farm in 2010 after patient satisfaction surveys revealed a demand. Over the past five years, the farm has grown to 25 acres, three hoop houses and four beehives. The farm grows fresh spinach, garlic, basil, collard greens, and strawberries.

“The farm helps us support a culture of wellness in the hospital,” says director of nutrition and wellness Lisa McDowell. “We can’t grow enough to meet the needs of all of our patients and staff, but we can make an educational statement about the importance of eating a healthy diet.”

While farm-to-hospital efforts have been well received by patients and created PR opportunities, operating a hospital-run farm is not without its challenges.

For starters, administrators are experts in healthcare, not agriculture.

To help launch its farm, St. Luke’s partnered with the Rodale Institute for assistance in creating and implementing a plan, hiring a farmer, and managing operations. At St. Joseph Mercy, the hospital invested $32,000 in two hoop houses, hired a full-time farmer to manage farming operations for the 537-bed hospital and relies on interns and volunteers to handle most of the labor.

It took a $125,000 capital investment to start the farm at St. Luke’s and, after two growing seasons, the farm is operating at a loss (with a goal of breaking even in 2016). The reason: Growing organic produce on the farm is more expensive than purchasing it through a food service supplier or sourcing it from local farms. But Nawrocki still champions the idea, explaining that encouraging patients to eat healthier diets now could improve their health in the future.

In addition to the capital investment to start farms, hospitals that want to serve fresh produce must invest in recipe development and training food service workers to transition from heating and reheating prepared foods to making dishes from scratch.

“When we order produce from a food service provider, it comes peeled and chopped and portioned; all our staff has to do is open the package and add it to the recipe,” McDowell explains. “Cooking with fresh foods from our farm is much more labor intense.”

In the future, the hospital hopes to partner with a local culinary program, using interns to offset the additional labor costs and make its hospital farm cost neutral by 2020.

Smallwood admits that food service staff is often resistant to the changes, which create additional work; hospitals that contract with external food service providers face the additional obstacle of needing to get buy-in.

“A paradigm shift has to occur,” he says. “Outsourcing is easier; over time, we believe that hospital-based farms can be as easy as outsourcing.”

It’s not just the behind-the-scenes issues that can stymie efforts to grow and serve fresh produce. Convincing patients to trade comfort foods like mac and cheese for whipped turnips and sautéed spinach can also be challenging.

“Some people just don’t care,” Nawrocki admits.

But, with the help of robust marketing campaigns and creative efforts, some hospitals are determined to help patients rethink their diets. St. Luke’s reduced prices at the salad bar by 25 percent to promote the farm’s produce; cafeteria sales are up 15 percent and, earlier this month, farmers’ markets at all six campuses sold out of produce.

“It takes creativity and flexibility to make [a hospital-based farm] work,” Nawrocki says. “But we believe it’s the right thing to do and that drives our efforts.”

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The tattoo-covered skateboarder-turned-distiller convinced local farmers that the peaches, pears, and apples that supermarkets didn’t want were perfect for distilling into artisan spirits.

Koons, a partner in Colorado-based Peach Street Distillers, admits that buying “seconds” was not part of the original business plan. Instead, he expected to buy prime fruit at market rates.

“When we started the distillery [in 2005] we had no idea there was such an abundance of unwanted fruit,” Koons explains. “We saw an opportunity to use fruit that would otherwise go to waste and do something positive with it.”

In 2014, Peach Street Distillers used 130,000 pounds of over-ripe peaches and 96,000 pounds of pears to produce more than 1,000 cases of fruit-based spirits.

The company is not alone: Artisan spirits producers like Clear Creek Distillery in Portland, Oregon, and Black Star Farms in Suttons Bay, Michigan, also buy fruit that is too flawed to be sold to consumers.

As awareness of food waste grows–Americans throw away 35 million tons of food every year, making it the number one source of solid waste–so do the efforts to reduce that waste.

“Repurposing seconds is wonderful, because, at a bare minimum, it keeps food out of landfill, where it aids climate change by creating methane,” says Jonathan Bloom, author of American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (and What We Can Do About It).

“Farmers don’t like the waste either, but they had no idea what to do with the fruit that the supermarkets wouldn’t take,” Koons explains.

Prior to selling their soon-to-be-discarded produce to artisanal spirits producers for 10 cents per pound, farmers in Colorado were digging pits to bury it or tossing it in the Colorado River to keep it from attracting pests.

Rachel Inman, operations manager at Clear Creek Distillery notes that the practice is nothing new. “Farmers have a long history of distilling fruits like pears and apples because they needed to use it before it went bad,” she explains.

To produce 10,000 cases of artisanal spirits annually, including pear eaux de vie and apple brandy, Clear Creek Distillery partnered with a packing house in the Hood River Valley to buy fruit that is too small or too scarred to be sold in supermarkets. Clear Creek buys upwards of 600,000 pounds of pears a year, using up to 30 pounds of fruit for each bottle.

“It goes from a pear worth two cents to a bottle of spirits that retails for $80,” Inman says. “It’s our way of doing something special with something ordinary.”

While farmers expect a certain percentage of their yield to be graded as seconds, there are often unexpected crop failures that cause additional waste.

For instance, this season, farmers in Colorado’s Grand Valley will struggle to sell their pears through traditional retailers because heavy rains caused scarring on the fruit. When there is too much rain in Oregon, leaving cherries with deep gashes in the flesh, farmers call Clear Creek about selling them the “split fruit” for their cherry liqueur.

“It’s still perfectly good fruit,” Inman says, even though it looks bad.

And there’s another benefit: The more ripe the fruit, the higher the sugar content.

“If we purchased fruit at peak ripeness, we’d have to wait for it to continue ripening–past the point when supermarkets would take it–because higher sugar content produces better spirits,” Koons explains.

Sometimes, sourcing overripe, undersized fruits is not an option for distillers. For instance, Clear Creek distills spirits from popular fruits like loganberries and Mirabel plums, which, thanks to high demand and limited supplies, are almost never available as seconds. “We’re paying top dollar for fruit that could be going to the supermarket,” Inman says.

Bloom is optimistic that the trend of distilling seconds could take off.

“I just hope that the distillers are transparent about the origins of their product to continue the surge of interest in ‘imperfect’ items,” he says. “While it may not help the hungry, distilling with ‘seconds’ sure could aid the thirsty!”

At Peach Street Distillers, Koons is happy to spread the gospel to all who come through the tasting room doors. “It’s so cool that we can use something that would have been thrown away and do something great with it,” he says. “We’re really proud of that.”

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